‘Three kilometers to the end of the world’: a dry blow against homophobia in Romania | Cinema: premieres and criticism

The colorful natural beauty of the Danube delta contrasts with the gloomy society that portrays Three kilometers to the end of the world, Romanian film Emanuel Pârvu about the homophobic attack on a young man in deep Romania. Tense and bleak, shows an intolerant and claustrophobic reality that contrasts with the amplitude of the landscapes that serve as a scenario to this terrible history.

Adi is a student who is going to spend a few days on vacation with his parents. It arrives from the city, and walks through the desert streets of the town with the brand of the stranger. One morning, Adi appears in his ground house to sticks and from that moment – marked by an ellipsis – a drama is unleashed in which his family and what the living forces of the people call will play an unfortunate role.

Actor and director of theater and film, Pârvu achieves from a very well calculated distance a resounding allegation against the structural homophobia of his country, in which, we are told, homosexuality remains a stigma. This is his third film after The Not So Bright Side of Things (2017) y Mikado (2021), and it is an austere drama despite having a gender echo, and that includes terror. Pârvu disassembles a rural reality in which the atavistic (from the sounds of trees to popular architecture) offers a luminous color that contrasts with the well of corruption (the police, the cacique) and the popular beliefs (the family and the priest). In that sense, almost half the film happens something chilling that shows with all its crudeness other types of homophobic aggression: that of religion.

The violence of Three kilometers to the end of the world It is deployed in different ways. The blows (most psychological) come from all the levels of a society anchored in the past. Of those layers, the most successful and painful is the familiar. ADI’s parents are the characters that best portrays the director, because in their denial they are as lost as intolerant and cruel.

Through fixed and leisurely planes, Pârvu is adding restraint sheets to the viewer, who never quite see the young man’s face. The camera only approaches his face when he is already crushed by the beating, and that makes the character a kind of mask whose deformity highlights his helpless but also his stigma. In the eyes of the people it is a monster, and that perception only accentuates the oppression of a character that will only find dignity in exile.